Comment by jdlyga

what types of videos have made that have gone viral?

It's a proper Skinner box. Very well made. And in millions of people's pockets too.

  """ Within such a possible future system, the only command or need
  that the machine would not respond to would be the one command that
  I have a feeling some of us would most want to type into the
  machine. Which is the demand that it destroy itself, you see, that
  would be my problem with the machine. It would meet all the needs
  except my need to see it destroyed. It would take every other
  command well, and meet every other need well, but the need to just
  to just shut it down. Television is something like that now.

  I feel sometimes as though I am plugged into a giant computer that
  will take every command I give it except the one that I want the
  most. The command that the damn machine blow itself up. It will do
  anything else I say. I type in "food", and out comes food. I type in
  "I want to give this talk in Washington". It comes out.  But the one
  command I want is the command for the damn thing to just go "boom!",
  and all the little transistors just to go... """

  Rick Roderick 1990

the tiktok algo is genuinely impressive. What's cool is that the engineers published some works explaining how it functions.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07663

It's an interesting read if you're into recommender systems or AI in general. What amazes me is that despite this published work google and meta still can't produce a decent social media algorithm, so it's either incompetence or malice.

same here. I found myself loosing an hour of just scrolling through short videos, most of them really good and ones that I liked. I had to delete the app because it was working too good.

Same reason I never touched prismatic after its first load.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prismatic_(app)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://youtube.com/shorts/3FISFq_sCH8

The algorithm will spoonfeed you content that you perceive a certain way, whether that's true or not is a different story. Unfortunately for most people, all those hilarious situations that are not-so-obviously staged just fly over their heads as genuine. My wife is smart and well educated, but I even had to keep correcting her when she showed me videos that she believed were genuine.

the TikTok reocmmendation engine seemed to work better with a sparse history and better understood user feedback about content that one wants to see or avoid

Instagram tbh just feels icky but at least you can explicitly like or dislike stuff not that it would fix the feed though

YT shorts is also good but I hate you can't say show me this or do not show me that and it is all based on duration. idk what the powers that be at YT were thinking but I'm sure they did user studies and stuff

so much for free market economics though stuck with two imperfect options because Zuck couldn't fix the feed :(

> the algorithm will learn you like authenticity and show you more of it.

Jesus, this is like a line out of a William Gibson novel. I hope you wrote that aware of the irony inherent in it.

I'm also reminded of this George Burns quote: "The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made."

I had cultivated a FYP that felt authentic to me, especially relative to everything else on the internet, but after a while it looked just as phony to my eyes, without any real change in the content itself. Just a different brand of phony.

Tiktok is serving you better things because

1) more people post there 2) you've used it much more and given them huge amounts of data on who you are and what your like to watch, when.

I can assure you those tiktok things are not the top of everyone's feed, sounds personalized. But your list for reels, and the other one sounds like the basic things they show to new people to try to figure out what they like, possibly somewhat curated by some past swipes.

Each of these are just algorithms. They get better the more you use them because your use = your data and personality and you've just used tiktok enough that they know _exactly_ what you like and who you are. Give it time, the others will come along if people use them

Have you considered that Reels is so bad precisely because you don’t use it?

Mine:

A bit from the SF Chronicle on the LA fires. A comedy/info bit by Alex Falcone. An Ad. A wrestling technique (I’m into judo and BJJ). A card trick. Cooking techniques. An ad.

It’s ad-heavy and frankly I don’t try to spend a lot of time on it. But as somebody who uses it at least some, I get absolutely zero of the kind of garbage you suggest.

I enjoy movies, even though they are staged.

Hm. I’m a grown man and I post reels to all the platforms. I like the tech and enjoy trying to emulate a professional process with prosumer equipment and practices (filming, editing, color grading, sound design, etc.).

After about 30 or so reels this year, I’ve got about 70 followers - half of which are definitely bots, a third are family/friends, and the rest seem to be real people.

My feed has a lot of people like me, and people whose content I think is at the quality I’d like to be at (mostly photographers, videographers, small but full-time YouTubers).

Maybe you’re just finding what you’re looking for.

My TikTok feed is full of very much adults and who own small businesses. I’ve seen some people in college, but there’s no kids in my feeds.

It's commensurate with how China treats foreign companies. Nobody can do serious business in China without the CCP's blessing, often involving a "partnership" with a local company.

Interpellation [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpellation_(philosophy)

Go outside, everyone's real .. at least for the time being!

I genuinely have no idea what Zuckerberg is responsible for at Facebook other than hijacking credentials (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433) and stealing/copying ideas

Anyone with half a brain ought to have come up with a better system than Reels is

I would use the word 'fresh' for TikTok; like old school YouTube, there's quirkiness and variety.

Strange. Until about a month ago, my IG feed was almost all independent and amateur musicians, interesting tech makers (NOT reviewers or “influencers”, and some alt comedy. Suddenly, in the past 4 weeks, my feed is all political propaganda from the far right, ads, and more ads.

I deleted Instagram because of the change. I’m done. Never used TikTok, it seemed totally fake to me.

Exactly. Despite using TikTok since mid 2019, I recognized very few of the top 20 accounts.

The timing of this with the Israeli crimes in Gaza is clear.

https://www.thefp.com/p/tik-tok-young-americans-hamas-mike-g...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/13/tiktok-...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/16/tiktok...

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-post/2024/3/...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/business/tiktok-israel-ha...

Lots of countries have made it illegal to listen things like Radio Free Europe. I'm guessing you can't in North Korea. On the other hand, a US citizen that wants to get the Chinese perspective on anything has lots of ways to legally find that and repeat it. I am not saying a lot of people in the US are interested in a foreign point of view, or that the US doesn't have tons of propaganda. But I don't think you can convince anyone that the two countries treat speech the same way.

Radio Free Europe is nothing like TikTok. Not only is broadcast media not able to be pinpoint targeted in real time to individuals, but the connection of who was behind RFE and other similar propaganda is pretty obvious, unlike tiktok.

Feels a little bit like the Chinpokomon episode of South Park - innocent kids being brainwashed and whatnot. (I know the target in that ep is Japan, but still)

I think that China is working to control left-wing activism in the U.S and TikTok is the perfect trojan horse to split the Democratic party and elevate their bribed proxies. I'd rather not go into how they're doing it, but certainly massive focus on the Gaza war in TikTok did do a number on the unity of the Democratic party.

Speaking of China influence I keep getting these stories on my social media feeds: Isn't this overpass, road, or this building, or this city in with lots of LED lights in China just great? China is the future, and so on!

...except that the "extremely precise targeting" is a new thing.

The DoD banning an app on their network is a lot different than banning it competely in the US. I would think DoD should ban most apps connecting to their networks that aren't work related. I feel this whole effort is either in bad faith or isn't being transparently communicated to the public.

NatSec should not even be needed. A simpler reason could be that China bans foreign social media apps from operating in China, so Chinese apps should be treated as such.

It was not for show. It acknowledged its success and was to limit its success. Then limit it as a "potential" vector for intrusion. Kaspersky was removed from the US on the same basis.

most bases still block twitter, facebook, flickr, etc too

https://www.wired.com/2009/06/despite-army-order-some-bases-...

well, probably yes

Wrong

1. China asked American SNS companys to 'obey Chinese laws', which mostly refer to content control and data ownership, these companys refused, China didn'tforced them to sell 2. Are you sure to play the 'same as what China does'? hey, we are a totalitarian, authoritarian, dictatorial regime, are we same? think twice

It's unfortunate that this comment is buried so deep and that generally this topic is under discussed.

Media has always been a force for controlling popular opinion, but in the age of social media it's going to new extremes. There are forces that try to control how you see the world on all social media platforms and do so to attempt to shape your opinions of the world and modify your actions.

You can visibly see Reddit has been completely taken over by bot, shills, and other controlled accounts. There is no sincere, real human opinion posted on the front page.

Even HN is not immune. "Bad news" has long been forbidden here, and there is a range of topics that, even when heavily upvoted by the community, tend to disappear within minutes.

The US owned all the newspapers in the run-up to Iraq war II…

Imagine if one company owned all the local news papers and replaced all the content with wire stories and the lowest quality local content or a fox news like company bough local news to run a propaganda operation. Oh wait that's real.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gannett

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group

"Imagine if a handful of ultra-billionaires controlled almost all social media in the US." doesn't feel less threatening. The fact that Congress doesn't consider this a problem feels like the bigger problem.

Didn't something similar happen with Grindr? It was Chinese owned and sold without nearly as much excitement. Given the inevitable bidding war from multiple interested parties I would be surprised if they couldn't get a fair price for TikTok

Do you think that ByteDance is primarily concerned with the economic considerations for TikTok, or do you think that it is something else?

Do you think that there is a price at which they would be willing to sell it?

It wouldn't have been at a bargain basement price if they started trying to sell it when the law passed. It could have been the highest market price they could get from the US's largest buyers.

Obviously they don't have the same leverage when they're otherwise going to be shut off in a few days.

Acts of congress can only be blocked by the supreme court's power of judicial review. The supreme court held a 2.5 hour hearing this past week and the only two justices who voiced skepticism of the law were Gorsuch and Thomas.

it's still much harder for overseas scams to succeed against someone who's tech savvy vs domestic identity fraud. There's simply a lot more barriers to moving money outside of the country

> Economic globalization means there are no borders and it's up to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their users

Historically speaking this is actually the opposite. Many critics of globalization have pointed out that you can directly track trade deals to massive spikes in border funding, much stronger enforcement of intellectual property laws, etc. Research actually shows a huge decrease in the dissemination of ideas, language, etc across borders where trade deals have been enacted. Paradoxically, globalization has made us more siloed off from each other

I use tiktok every day. Maybe I don't know what 'authentic' means, but I don't think most content on tiktok is authentic. I think it is a particular type of fitting to an ideal or trend.

> Equal shot at virality

What makes you think that? The process is not open and fully controlled by the company running the show

They completely revamped the UX from being essentially an instagram clone focusing on pictures and written content, to increasingly a tiktok clone focusing on browseable short form video?

Are you going to need similar evidence if I claim that YouTube has been working on being a TikTok replacement as well? It's pretty clear that YouTube created the "shorts" feature as an attempt to allow TikTok creators to trivially repost content.

What I don't understand is what's with all the China apologists around here, it's absolutely insane to me to see how even here, but also on reddit, for example, there is this wave of praising everything that a dictatorship does, do people really believe that what China does is ok and something to follow, or is it just propaganda? And no, I'm not ignoring all the bad stuff in the west, but I'm a bit afraid of the Chinese model appreciation.

"The algorithm" doesn't matter as much as you think it does. If all the videos have metadata, it's quite simple to suggest another video to someone if they just watched a similar video. I watch how my wife uses TikTok, and "the algorithm" is hit or miss. Most of the time it's a hit, but that's because the metadata from the preceding videos (and how long she watched them, or didn't) makes it easy to figure out what she'll most likely want to watch next. Without metadata, there is no "algorithm", and with metadata, it's trivially easy for anyone to produce "an algorithm" that does the same thing, maybe even better than TikTok does it now. I mean, if you do a search about how to put on makeup, then the next 10 videos you see are going to be about how to put on makeup - that isn't exactly an irreplaceable algorithm.

Thanks for that link! Really interesting.